All posts tagged: Furniture

We all know I love vintage shopping. We all know I like a bargain. Good—glad we got that out of the way. See that rug up there? I bought it. For $40. At an auction!

There are lots of ways to find good deals on vintage/antique stuff: occasionally you’ll get a deal at antique stores, but I tend to favor consignment shops, thrift stores, salvage shops, flea markets, Craigslist, and the curb. Sometimes I venture into the land of eBay and Etsy but I like to see and touch and inspect things in person, so online shopping can be tricky. Also I hate waiting for shipping because I’m impatient.

In the past couple of years though, I’ve started going to more and more AUCTIONS! Auctions are my kind of fun: the people-watching is usually good, and I like seeing how much things go for even if I’m not really interested in them. It’s an exciting way to spend an evening…or afternoon…or morning…when ISN’T a good time for an auction, really? Especially if you’ve never been to one, though, the whole thing can be a little intimidating. In my experience, the general crowd at an auction seems to be largely composed of dealers—which is good if you’re not one, because you’re often bidding against people who have to be able to re-sell whatever’s for sale at a big mark-up for their attendance to be worthwhile. So if, like me, you have rooms to decorate and renovations to outfit, auctions can be an awesome resource once you get over the initial apprehension that might come along with trying it out.

Every auction house works a little bit differently, but here are some tips I’ve picked up along the way with the ones I’ve gone to!

1. Finding the auction! A quick Google search should pull up auction houses in your area. Most of them will have a website or at least a Facebook page giving some detail about the upcoming sales. Some places hold auctions on a regular schedule—once a week, typically—but others may be a few weeks between sales. Auctionzip.com is a great resource for finding sales in your area.

2. GO TO THE PREVIEW. ALWAYS. Before the auction, there’s a preview. Sometimes it’s a day or two before, and sometimes it’s just a few hours before the auction actually commences—usually the auction house will list this information, but just ask if it isn’t listed. GO. This is your opportunity to look at all the things for sale, and inspect anything you might actually want to buy. Usually there are paper copies available of the entire catalog that you can use for reference. I like to circle items that I’m interested in, and perhaps make small notes so I remember any flaws or repair work or whatever. There’s typically a LOT of stuff so it’s easy to forget—particularly if there are ten light fixtures you might want but two you REALLY want. You have to be able to remember which two! Obviously don’t break anything, but the preview time is there for you to touch things, open doors and drawers, and make sure it’s something you really want to buy. It may also allow you some time to check what similar items might be selling for online, so you have a point of reference for what a fair/good price might look like.

3. Bring a tape measure! You never know what you might find, and seeing a bunch of stuff sprawled out in an open space can mess with your sense of scale. You want to make sure you can fit whatever it is in your life!

4. If you can’t make it to the preview, your auction house might post the whole catalog online. The pictures are generally poor quality, but sometimes it’s enough to get a good idea. Sometimes, a few more items will be added to a sale that never make it into that online catalog, so going in person is definitely the best thing. If you can’t make it to the preview, though, sometimes it’s best to just skip the auction—purchases you immediately regret upon actually seeing them in real life suck!

5. Register to bid! The auction house will typically want your name, address and phone number, and then you’ll be in their system which makes the process faster next time. They’ll give you a bidder card with a number on the front, and typically a place on the back for you to fill in with your purchases. That space on the back of the card is really for your benefit—once you win an item, your number is noted in their system as the winning bid. But it’s good to keep track of your purchases yourself regardless—mistakes happen occasionally, and you don’t want to spend your whole paycheck!

If it’s your first time at an auction house, give yourself plenty of time to register—the registration counter will become crowded as the auction approaches, and you don’t want to miss the first items if you’re interested in them because you don’t have your card in hand yet!

6. Bring a checkbook! Or cash! On your winning bid, there is a buyer’s premium: essentially a percentage of your winning bid that gets added. The buyer’s premium is usually between 10-20% of the winning bid, but many auction houses charge a lower buyer’s premium if you pay with cash or check instead of a card.

7. Lots: anything that goes up for sale as a unit is called a “lot.” When you bid on a lot, you buy it all—so sometimes a lot will be just one piece of furniture, sometimes it will be two chairs and a side table, or it might be a box lot like the ones above, which are just groupings of similar items that the auction house decides to sell as a single lot. Don’t disregard box lots! Even if there are 30 things in a box lot and you only want 2 of them, sometimes you can buy the whole thing for 5 bucks and then you just have 28 things to get rid of or resell or whatever. Ha!

8. Bidding! The actual bidding part is SUCH a rush but also sort of scary, so a few things are liable to happen: either you get so determined just to WIN that you end up over-paying and regretting it, or something is just going way too cheap so you buy it just BECAUSE and then you have shit you didn’t really want, or most LIKELY you get too nervous and flustered and don’t bid or stop bidding and then lose stuff that you actually would have paid more for if only you had a second to think! That’s the WORST. So I like to pencil in my maximum bid next to the item in the catalog (and keep that shit close to your chest!), so I don’t end up in any of those positions. It’s such a simple thing but makes a huge difference, I promise! Always know how high you’re really willing to go before you bid.

My rule: don’t be the first to bid, ever. Often, the auctioneer will open bidding at something like $100, and then nobody will bid until he drops down to $5. Let other people bid it up and swoop in toward the end if it’s still in your price range. You don’t want to be the dummy that raised your hand at $100 when you could have walked away winning for $30. At the same time, don’t wait too long because sometimes nobody will bid, and the winner is just the first hand up—so if you want it, be that hand.

Also, try to sit toward the center, in clear view of the auctioneer. It SUCKS to bid on something and the auctioneer just doesn’t see you. I like sitting more toward the back than the front—that way I can watch my competition. You can pick up a surprising amount from body language!

Also, also: SOME auction houses will have the entire catalog photographed and displayed on a slideshow so you know what you’re bidding on. Sometimes, auction house workers will carry each individual item up to the podium area as they come up. In the first case, bidding is more likely to go in order of the catalog—meaning you know if you can go to the bathroom or something because the next item you’re interested in is 20 lots away. When the catalog isn’t photographed, often they’ll just auction things off in the random order that the auction worker grabs them off the floor, so you have to pay attention.

9. Leaving a bid: If you can’t make it to the auction in person, you might still be able to buy stuff! You can usually leave a bid on an item with the auction house, and then your bid competes against bidders who are there in person. EDIT: if you leave a bid on a chair for $400, and the highest bid in the house is $50, you will win it for $55 or $60—whatever increments the auctioneer is increasing the bid at.

10. Phone and online bidding: again, if you can’t be there in person but might be able to bid in real time remotely, the auction house might be using a service like Auctionzip.com to allow online bidding. It’s the future! It’s kind of like eBay but way more intense: you have to sit there and wait for your item to come up, and then you’re bidding in real time against any other online bidders and whoever is sitting in the auction house. It moves quickly! For phone bidding, tell the house which lot you want to bid on, and they’ll call you when the item comes up and you can bid over the phone, much like you would if you were in the room.

11. Bring refreshments! Auction houses often sell concessions like hot dogs and sodas and stuff, but maybe you don’t want that? Bring your own! Even though each individual lot might only take 30 seconds or so between opening bid and hammer, the entire auction might last a few hours. Be prepared! For the love of god, leave your kids at home and don’t bring friends with short attention spans. Auctions are just too boring for some people.

12. It’s OK to leave early! If you’re over it, or everything in the catalog that you were interested in has already come up, snag the opportunity to beat the line at the end and check out early. It can take a while for everyone to check out, and then even longer for the house to bring out your items if you wait all the way until the last lot.

13. Be nice! Nobody likes a sore loser, so don’t be one. Also, if you have friends you go to the auction with, make sure you’re not competing!! If three of you want the same item, be open about your max bids then let whoever is willing to pay the most bid on it. It’s never worth losing friends over! With other attendees, don’t be an asshole! You never know if you’ll end up walking into that dealer’s store, and you don’t want to be remembered as that jerk from the auction. Also, you might start seeing items that you saw go at auction for $10 in a store for $200—knowing what somebody paid for something does not give you license to begrudge them what they’re reselling it for.

OK SO NOW THAT YOU KNOW HOW TO DO IT…wanna see a thing?

I went to an auction a couple weeks ago. I saw THIS. I was filled with FEELINGS.

SO I BOUGHT IT FOR $200 AND NOW IT IS IN MY BEDROOM! It’s so tall. It’s so beautiful. It’s so…not my usual thing! Where furniture is concerned, I typically like modern from the past 60-70 years or so, or really primitive kinds of antiques from before 1850-ish. Then again I can be a sucker for Art Deco, so I don’t know. This armoire is Eastlake style—call it 1870s. I normally don’t like Victorian furniture for myself, but I make an exception for Eastlake because it was really a reaction against what we think of as Victorian furniture—the SUPER ornate, Rococo-revival kinds of stuff. Although the style of my radiators are literally named “Rococo” and I think they’re incredibly beautiful. What’s my point?

I have no point, except that the way to Narnia is through my bedroom and I’m pretty psyched up about it. I really like waking up and seeing this thing.

Right now the inside is set up with a clothing rod, but…I want a TV in it. I know I just renovated the denand the bedroom, but I do kind of miss having a TV in the bedroom because I’m trash, but I also want it concealed because I’m an insufferable snob. It’s a delicate balance.

To tie this post together, this is part of why you go to the preview! The armoire is not in perfect shape—it’s missing a few little trim pieces and the lockset for the doors, but look what was hiding in that lower drawer! All the pieces! Plus a finial that doesn’t appear to match anything. So $200 and an hour or two of little repair work, and it’ll be good to go.

I love this dresser! It’s probably from the mid-1800s, which is sort of fun because so is my house! I obviously don’t want a time capsule house, but it’s always fun to pepper pieces around that could have been there originally, I think. It’s something I’d like to do more of as I’m able to find and afford this stuff. I think this dresser is actually intended more for linens, so I can see eventually moving it out of the bedroom and putting it somewhere else in the house, too. Ya know. Versatile unique cool piece that I expect to have for a long ass time.

One thing that’s never been quite right about the dresser (and probably the reason I was able to snag it for $300 in the first place) is the knobs. They’re reproductions, definitely not original or at all old. Whoever installed them did a pretty good job matching the stain, but not amazing, so I’ve always planned to do something about it. Then one broke in half in my hand one day, and another one fell off, so I put on a random knob I had laying around “temporarily,” a solution that lasted a mere two years. Every now and then I’d feel a burst of inspiration to try to find a new set of 8 knobs only to give up and forget it. It was a fun thing to get momentarily fixated on every couple of months.

The problem was that I didn’t feel confident that a new set of wood knobs would be any kind of improvement, but the real complicating factor was the size! The replacement wood knobs were the right size at 2″ in diameter, but typical knobs are between maybe 3/4″ and 1.5″ on the large end and that would look too dinky.

See? Major struggle.

Then a few weeks ago, somebody kindly alerted me in the comments to a lot of 8 Sandwich Glass knobs on eBay that would look good on my dresser! So I dashed to eBay! I found nothing!

Like I said, major struggle. But thank you for trying, kind stranger. This is the kind of help and support that I need.

ANYWAY. I don’t know what the original knobs on this dresser were, but it’s possible they were glass. Brief history corner, here we go! The Sandwich Glass Company operated out of Massachusetts from 1826-1888 and notably made pressed glass knobs among other things. So glass knobs became a big thing, and by the middle of the century were pretty ubiquitous. Fun facts.

Now, glass knobs are very beautiful and there are some AMAZING antique ones out there. But finding a set of 8 is tough, and when they do come up, they are not cheap. In addition, you may be aware that I’m renovating a 150 year old house, so my motivation and available funds to address this very small aspect of my life is low. Like lower on the priority list than changing the dead lightbulb on my garage, but easier because I don’t have to go outside. Point is, I wanted to order a nice thing from the Internet, have it delivered to my home, install, admire, and move on with my mess of a life.

House of Antique Hardware is a GREAT resource, by the way. I’ve ordered a number of things from them over the years and the quality has always been excellent, prices are fair, and there’s a big selection of products. I love them.

In anticipation of my new knobs arriving in the mail, I figured it was a good time to give the dresser a little bit of attention. It’s a little beat up generally and the last few years have not been especially kind to any of my possessions.

Little dings and scratches and discoloration, ya know. These things happen. I think those scratches look suspiciously like Mekko nails. Dogs are so great but they also fuck up your stuff.

I love Restor-A-Finish. What’s not to love? It’s so easy and quick and great for blending in small damage (like what’s all over this piece) without losing the existing patina. The last thing I want is for this to look new or newly refinished. I had a couple different cans in the basement that I mixed together and buffed in with part of an old t-shirt. Easy peesy.

Then I put my new knobs on, and done! I think it looks cute. I am satisfied.

By the way, can we also appreciate that the walls are not crumbling plaster and the moldings are freshly painted and it looks like a real room that someone lives in? I love the wall color with the tones of wood in this piece. It’s working for me! I don’t know what to do up top in terms of art and stuff. I think the fact that I secretly had a 47″ TV on top of it before I renovated the bedroom did not prepare me well for imagining this wall ever being pretty. Now that the room is nice I can’t bear to put the TV back, so I have to try to remember how to be stylish?

(You have to be in some strange positions to ever see that little Sonos speaker tucked underneath the dresser when you’re actually in the room, but I know it looks silly in this photo. Forgive me! I do love my Sonos system, though.)

A couple of weekends ago, Max and Anna and I hung out for a few hours down around Newburgh. We went to Anna’s mommy’s house to say hi and check out her beaaaauuutiful newly-refinished wood floors. Those floors are not the point of this post, but it kind of threw my floor-refinishing fantasies into overdrive. Our floors downstairs are a total mess, and I know they could be gorgeous refinished. Someday, floors. Someday. Anna’s stepfather, Bernie, said I could do it myself…which of course is giving me all kinds of ideas about my own abilities that I probably shouldn’t have. We’ll see.

Anyway. Then we went to lunch, and on the way back to Anna’s house, we stopped to check out the new Newburgh Vintage Emporium. I don’t usually buy anything from places like this since everything is usually out of my price range, but it’s fun to look. And then, toward the end—THIS DRESSER! I’ve been casually looking for a dresser since we bought the house (let’s just not talk about our clothing storage situation prior to this, cool?), and then I saw this one and it was all over.

I think the dresser is probably early-mid 1800s (so about the age of our house!), but beyond that I don’t know tons about it! I love how simple it is, and I love how each drawer is a different size, and that each one has a keyhole and lock. We don’t have the key, but I don’t really care about that. I wish it was more apparent from the photos, but what really drew me to it was the size! This thing is HUGE. It has the proportions of a much smaller dresser, but it’s totally bulky and boxy and enormous.

At about $300 it wasn’t the best bargain in the world, but I still think it’s a good deal for a piece like this (I think similar ones tend to be more in the $600-and-up-range). The reason it was probably semi-affordable is that the knobs definitely aren’t original, which doesn’t really bother me. For me, that’s always been a realistic way to collect antiques—pieces that have non-original parts or have been repaired or refinished or altered aren’t as valuable as ones in totally original condition. If prices aren’t already lowered as a result, knowing what to look for and pointing out stuff like that can be a good negotiating tactic. The knobs on this dresser are just too pristine and stained too uniformly to be original, but I think the shape and size are kind of nice and they aren’t by any means offensive, so I’ll live with them for a while and maybe change them up down the line somehow.

Isn’t it super great how the back legs are all un-fancy and just continuous with the side/back panels and the front legs are pretty turned wood? I think that detail sold me. I love this thing.

Other than the dresser, the bedroom looks pretty much the same as it did back when I posted about it in august. We had to pick up the rug because it was just getting too dirty with all the dust and debris getting tracked around the house all the time, and we’ve since stripped the walls almost completely down to the bare plaster—they were covered in wallpaper and layers of paint, all of which were peeling off the walls in large pieces. I know the plaster walls look fun and arty and beautiful and people will try to convince me to not repair, skim-coat, and paint them, but I swear it’s just the pictures. Parts of them (like the part behind the dresser, for instance) are in pretty great condition, while other parts are totally falling apart and a complete mess, beyond the point of doing small fixes that could blend in a good way. I also just really don’t think this is the house for bare plaster walls. Our friend John has some bare plaster walls in his house (sealed with some kind of varnish to keep dust under control), but his house is a 1725 Dutch stone house and beautifully rustic, where that look really works. Our house, by contrast, is kind of a modest Greek Revival, and I really think the house just wants to be simple and clean and bright. Maybe that sounds like crazy-talk, but I really feel like the house dictates what it wants to be, and it’s more or less my job to make that happen.

ANYWAY.

I still love the deco bed but I do feel like it’s totally out of scale with the dresser and kind of wacky in a bad way, but that’s OK at this point. Maybe it’ll become a guest bed someday. Maybe the dresser will go somewhere else. I know everyone really just wants to see a beautiful, put-together room, but that’s not really how my life works and therefore not really how this blog works. Right now, our attention (and money) is focused almost exclusively on renovating the house and maybe collecting pieces here and there that we really love, and I’m fine with that. We (like pretty much everyone…) have years to figure out how to mix and match our pieces and play around until things look right (or right-enough), and honestly that’s way more exciting to me than trying to do it all in one pass.

The bedroom is pretty low on the list of priorities right now, honestly, but it feels very exciting to finally have a place to store our underwear like fancy adults! Step in the right direction.

Throughout basically my entire childhood and adolescence, I can’t recall my parents buying furniture. Our house had furniture, so I never really thought too hard about it. That I’d never seen my mom hem and haw over a fabric sample or my dad try and fail to assemble something from IKEA never really struck me as weird, even when we moved to a larger house when I was 7. Instead of going to stores and finding the right pieces to fill the space, selected as part of a pre-planned decor scheme, the house just sort of became furnished. It wasn’t until a little later that I started to understand that most of the furniture we owned had at one time belonged to another family member, and even later when I realized that all of my relatives are lunatics.

It wasn’t that my parents couldn’t have bought their own furniture (that would be different), but that they just never really had a reason to. Instead, it seems like anything that my grandparents bought between the years of about 1960 to 1980 but no longer used——including office furniture——was systematically kept, stored, and shipped great distances on an as-needed basis years later. Even now, if the second or third caretaker of one such piece then decides they don’t want it, its donation or sale must be agreed upon by all members of my parents’ generation (and, increasingly, my generation), lest someone else might want it or someday decide that they might someday want it. Then it goes back into storage and waits for the house that so-and-so won’t own for a decade. It’s psychotic.

The actual economics of this are often completely backward, since all of the storing and the moving and the shipping ends up costing more than the value of the furniture to begin with, but that isn’t the point. The point is, if you need a sectional sofa in my family, you can take your pick between the maroon one and the black one, and maybe they’re both missing parts, but on the plus side they’re already broken in a little and have a modicum of sentimental value for somebody, somewhere.

As this stems from my father’s side of the family, I’m not sure my mother knew what sort of life she was signing up for: the kind where actually buying anything new amounted to an act of rebellion, liberation, desperation, or all three. The poor woman has literally hated her bedroom furniture for 20 years——not casually, in the way that you might want a new set of dishes but never seem to find the time, but aggressively and persistently, day in and day out, for two decades. And it wasn’t like there was a honeymoon period at the beginning when it was new and she actually did like it, because in the context of her life it was never new. It just arrived at some point, and that was that.

Of the many things in my childhood home that my mother openly despised, very few received as much disdain as our dining room set. She has been plotting to get rid of it the entire time I’ve known her. I’m not even really sure what her major gripe with it was——something about the chairs being uncomfortable and not liking the shape of the table——but I’m not sure it really matters. It was more of a fixation, an imaginary problem into which many of her broader frustrations were slowly channeled. At various times she would find a new table option here or chair option there, but the effort always fell just short of actually placing the order. I think eventually the pressure of finding something that would make her happy became too overwhelming to outweigh just living with the anger, so she resigned herself to just waiting until they moved.

Once my parents actually did make the commitment to move, it was more or less assumed that the ridiculous cycle of storing and shipping old many-times-used furniture would just continue as it always had. To their credit, my parents did get rid of a lot of stuff, but the option was put to us kids to claim whatever we wanted first. Seeing as I’m the only one with the space or the need, I got the only thing I was truly interested in.

BOOM DINING ROOM SET. It is mine. Finally it is loved.

This set was purchased by my grandparents for the house my dad grew up in around 1965. It doesn’t have any manufacturer marks or labels, so I have no idea who the designer or brand is, but I love it. The chair frames are all brassy or bronze-y or some kind of warm metal-y with lots of patina, and the seats and backs are black leather slings with white stitching. I personally think they’re comfortable, but I also personally don’t give a shit either way because look at that fine chair.

I love chairs.

My father reports that as a teenager, he used to sit at this dining set and listen to Jefferson Airplane and watch the wallpaper.

Stoner.

Now for the potentially controversial part of the post. I don’t think I actually like the table. My evolution toward becoming my mother is officially complete.

Objectively, it’s a nice table. It’s solid wood. It has leaves. It’s in really good condition. However, the original finish was a much lighter wood tone, and in an effort to make themselves like it, my parents had the whole thing ebonized in the 80s. Consequently, even though the set is from the 60s and the chairs alone are delicious, the set together reads very 80s to me. Black leather is one of those tough things that really only works in certain contexts, I think, without looking like Wall Street.

Luckily, my dream dining table is actually pretty attainable. I know people will roll their eyes, but the IKEA NORDEN table is SO nice. It’s solid birch, has great simple lines, and is HUGE (a bit bigger than this table, which I think will fit the room better). I think it would look reallllly good with the chairs, too, and complement them way better than this table does. Since this is our only dining space and we use it constantly (as opposed to the last 20 years, when this table only got used a few times a year because we had an eat-in kitchen), it would also be nice to have something I wouldn’t have to worry so much about damaging. Even though I don’t particularly like this table, I also do want to keep it in good shape.

One of the weirder things about our home renovation is that we came here with very little stuff. There was some spill-over from the apartment——a few little things I’d been saving——but by and large, we’re starting fresh. We’re furnishing very slowly, as we find pieces that we both like and fit our budget of wildly cheap/free, and we’re also going to be getting a few pieces of furniture from my parents, who are downsizing from my childhood home to a new condo in a few months. We have to wait on that stuff, but I’m really excited to have it. My family has always been weirdos about passing hand-me-down furniture around across impractical distances, so I’m glad that tradition is continuing in my generation.

Prior to moving in, I had certain ideas about what the first few months in the house would be like. I reasoned that it would be a luxury to have no furniture while we were busy painting and stripping wallpaper and all that, since there would be less stuff to work around. We’d work until our whole bodies ached, and then we’d collapse onto an air-mattress made for camping, which would be serving triple-duty as a bed, a sofa, and a dining table, since we’d have none of these things. It would be like an extended camping trip, and everyone says camping is fun!

We bought the air mattress on our first night, but soon realized that my plan had several flaws. The first was that camping is not fun, and camping in a house is probably less fun than real camping because you aren’t supposed to be filthy and uncomfortable in a house. The bigger issue was that renovating——while gratifying——is also hard. It’s physically demanding and draining work, and by the end of the day (or, more accurately, the middle of the night), you really just want to escape a little bit and go somewhere that isn’t in chaos. Somewhere that’s actually pretty clean and comfortable and looks kind of OK? It took about one night on the air mattress for me to go from trying to be really hardcore about this whole thing to just wanting a few small luxuries to counterbalance the world of crazy we’d just opened for ourselves. So, aside from the kitchen, we decided that the bedroom really needed to be a priority. Not getting it done and fully decorated and looking perfect, of course, but enough that we could close it off at the end of the day and feel good about things.

So here we go! Sorry the picture is terrible. Very much a work in progress, but there’s a bed and side tables and lamps and even a rug! I’m sure this room will change a lot over time (as in, the only thing I really want in here in the longterm is the bed!), but it feels good right now.

We found the bed in an antiques store in Saugerties (which is a town a little bit north of us) called Newberry Antiques. I have a serious soft spot for an Art Deco piece of furniture here and there, and I was blown away by the condition of this bed as soon as I saw it, since these pieces often have tons of chipped or missing veneer. I figured it would be a bajillion dollars, but it was priced at $250, which I got dropped to $200 (never hurts to ask!), and I was sold!

When buying vintage beds, it’s important to MEASURE. I’m not sure exactly when mattress sizes were standardized, but often vintage/antique beds are weird sizes and need to be altered to fit modern mattresses, but luckily this one was a standard full size! Bed frames always look weirdly tiny without an actual mattress in them, so don’t just eyeball it. If you don’t have a measuring tape, antique stores always have one on hand for you, and often even thrift stores do, too! Often the matching side rails are hiding somewhere else in the store, and it’s easy to cut slats to hold the mattress up——we just used about a dozen 1 x 4 pieces of cheap pine, and the whole thing is very solid.

The other thing to remember is that vintage beds were made before the time of these crazy 22″-thick pillow-top enormous mattresses you can buy these days, so don’t go trying to put something like that on an old bed. It will look ridiculous. I don’t like mattresses like that, anyway (my back seems to prefer very cheap, firm mattresses), but with vintage beds, you want a mattress that’s about 10″ thick, give or take a couple inches. PSA, over.

The duvet cover is from IKEA. I like it! The side table came with us from the apartment (I’d still love to find a better top for it), and the lamp is vintage from a junk shop. The cord situation is a little annoying, but the outlet placement in this room is strange. Hopefully we can have a couple more receptacles installed down the line.

The rug is from the Nate Berkus collection at Target, and it comes Mekko-approved. It’s not really the right rug for this space, but that’s OK. It makes it feel like a real room, and that’s the goal!

When the kitchen is done (so close!), we’ll probably turn our attention to this room, but for real this time. We have a thrifted dresser sitting in the garage waiting for me to repair and refinish it, and all the walls need to be stripped and painted. As you can see in the pictures, there’s some serious flaking/peeling going on (that’s what happens with there’s like 3 layers of wallpaper and a million layers of paint separating from old plaster walls that weren’t heated for two winters!), but we’ll get to it! One thing at a time.